


Of a Melancholy Spirit

by opti



Category: Parks and Recreation
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Horror, Dreams, F/M, Sexual Content, Vigilantism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-17
Updated: 2016-11-04
Packaged: 2018-08-15 13:18:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8057908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/opti/pseuds/opti
Summary: The woman in the woods continues her midnight doings, unperturbed until a new town crier (some say, town idiot) arrives and complicates everything.





	1. Limbs

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you guys enjoy this one! I've been wanting to write different things, just genre-wise but still A/A. I tried horror before, but I went to far in that direction without much reliance on the actual relationship part.
> 
> Who asked for this? Probably nobody. Nevertheless, this is a twist on an idea I had a long time ago. The mythology here, what little there is, is my own only by nature of the thing. I prefer the weird fiction of the 19th century, and its style of not explaining every single detail to the reader about its characters and fantasy.
> 
> There is some eventual sexual content and mild body horror stuff, but it's just an idea that popped into my head again for no good reason.

Pawnee is a warm village, in the words April would use, and not by nature of its character or the character of the inhabitants, but by the wealth of its treasures it had to offer her.

On a usual trip into the local village for supplies she can't otherwise forage or work herself -- plain lethargy hurts this more than anything -- there's a riotous occasion in the streets. A tall, scruffy-bearded man in plain, dirty slacks and workman's shirt she's never had the pleasure of glancing sideways at leaves the local tavern with a crowd of jeering idiots in his wake. She recognizes  _those_ men, the ones with crooked teeth and twisted fingerbones she's personally seen to several times. Their white pallor attests to this, though April continues her shopping. Ignoring the hollering, she catches the newcomer stumbling over towards what constitutes as the shoddy village square here. It all makes sense now, as she hears a booming, drunken drawl awaken in that direction -- he's the new town crier; or, more accurately, the small village of Pawnee has found its new idiot.

The boy with the ridiculous pompadour hair filled that slot nicely some weeks before until he was run out by the mayor after a major scandal involving his daughter. April never bothered with him.

But as she pondered the rendered soaps, something she wishes could come from anywhere else, a crowd of those same dirty men wanders behind her. With her back turned, she is safe. Though they tolerate her, most of the menfolk have bizarre stories about the woman in the woods. Stories that sound silly to their wives, daughters, neighbors, but nevertheless they insist. With wild eyes and slobbering jowls, these men  _insist_ that she is not what she says she is -- a soothsayer, a simple hermit who likes to pretend she can scry and see the future and so many other ridiculous notions -- but nobody believes them. Half of them are mistaken for raving lunatics, with deranged notions about nights alone, and so cold. Much colder than anything they've experienced before and they swear on the blood of their blood that she was there.

And yet, despite this, the old woman selling her soaps and fats accepts the few coins April has to offer. Only this rabble, this eternally confused and seemingly unlucky collection of ne'er-do-wells goes on with their rantings. Thankfully, in the broad daylight their awful stories are a rude joke and they are scorned with the most delightful mockery.

The bag in her hands feels heavier today, though she knows that it is the same amount as last month. Spacing those nights out further, trying to prolong the inevitable, has left her drained; weakened.

In the village square, with her purchases safely stowed away in case of any sudden trouble that April simply has no strength to deal with at the moment, she witnesses the man that left what was an apparently hilarious joke. Now that she could stop and lay her eyes on him fully, April does not mind what she sees. That scruff common to the callus-handed farmer is there, unkempt and spotty at best, alongside sometimes wild curls surrounded by uncombed locks of uneven length. But there is just something about him that ignites something, a faint reminder, and April cannot ignore it. She catches a whiff of the scent of what could only be described as salted mud and chocolate coming from him.

_You will be next._

 

 

* * *

 

 

After a luxurious bath with her new soap, scented with her own mixture of the lavender she grows in a little hideaway, the night is just now slowly falling over Pawnee. The crest of trees surrounding the little town on one side creaks and croaks in the gentle wind passing through, chilling the night until it is the perfect hour. 

It is no lie that April prefers black to begin with, but it is crucial on these nights. 

Even now, in her little hovel filled with the little trinkets of friends long, long gone and books upon books of memories she's jotted down because there is simply too much to remember all at once, she can hear the quiet thumping of little ones around her. In the trees full, warm squirrels nestle, thin wild dogs lurking in desperate hunger, and thicker, plumper cows in the fields on the opposite side of the town all call to her, whispering and begging. Her skin is clammy, cold to the touch now, and she can wait no longer.

Descending upon the town in her much less billowy clothes as before, April tries to take a deep, steadying breath. She had a new figure in mind this time, one with lean, farmhand muscle and a drunk's belly. It would do nicely. 

Finding him was easy, simply following that same odor to an apartment building. Along the streets she only sees the shuttered windows of fearful men, the open windows and gentle candlelight belonging to the women she largely ignores. None of them have sinned as the others, and so none of them have deserved the gifts she takes from the men. The scraggly toothed man was first, after what he tried to do to her before a constable arrived in that alley. The puffed, figure-obscuring clothing was necessary after that. He deserved the pulpy tendons that tightened his hands and destroyed his ability to work, leaving him destitute and alone forever after his back gave out and, eventually, his legs began to fail him. The local doctor, a kind and vindictive man that April could only relate to, claimed both legs would need to be amputated in the next week. A mysterious gangrene of the blood was spreading, he said, and the black veins were starting to encroach upon his heart.

The folklore is all wrong, and April loves it. It makes her job so much easier.

Like now, past the home of a man with a mouth that refuses to open, and eyes that by the day lose focus more and more. Hers was a slow acting venom, a kind that April relishes in without any remorse. As a rule, they all deserve it. Likewise, this newcomer must be observed, and if his nightly doings were any serious worry, she would have good reason to visit him. If not, there were always the adulterers with faithful, loving wives or the gamblers with starving children. She prefers not to think about those other halves of the equation, like she were some kind of vigilante taking justice that no law could upon these men for being so cruel to their betters stuck to them forever by frivolous law. It is much better to imagine them as lonely, terrible people with one useful resource.

He lives in the apartment at the back of the second floor, past the groaning folks that toss in their sleep. Inside his room, it is pitch black and he is sound asleep. Nothing horrible, but this isn't the purpose of her visit. It was likely that he would be asleep, and not doing something horrific on the spot. Kneeling beside where his head lay, April leaned forward and pressed the cool of her lips to his temple.

Inside, his mind felt of fields, yearning for somewhere to sleep surrounded by the warmth of a woman, with a hearth smoky and cindered in a house away from a man with a crooked nose and a missing tooth. 

She could see what he longed for, and simple it was: a child, a wife.

Pulling back, April's face felt full of blood and red though she knew nothing of the sort was happening. She had only probed, nothing more, but still she was full and sated. But something more burned, something she wanted beyond just her nightly feeding. She couldn't have taken much, because April never traded for her own portion of the curse to soak inside of him. And, truth, his skin was not blackened at the spot; there were no veins discolored and his sleeping form did not wrack itself with coughs.

April knew she could never bear what he would want, but she could implant suggestions. A thought here of her billowing skirts hiked up, or of that field with the two of them. She stands up, takes another steadying breath that reminds of the warmth in her face, and flees before anything more can happen.

Pawnee's night is not so cold tonight.

 

 

* * *

 

 

It does not leave her for weeks, that heat and sustenance. What it was, she isn't sure. She had only ever fed on the miserable, the weak and terrible, whose oddities and insecurities she bit down into and drained until they were left as the awful husks they hid from everyone else. In that time, with this  _Andrew_ in her blood, she witnessed what kind of man he was. Never did her visit come up, for she rarely spoke to him. The woman of the woods visited town more frequently, though not to buy soap.

He works for the village council, the small government that April knew well by now. She remembers trials that ended in nothing, and the pigheaded crowd that fronted the organization was backed by only one woman. The one woman was a surprise, even. However, her expertise was obvious and it was clear that she could have run the whole thing herself. Instead of being a part of the terrible system inside, Andrew as she's come to know him instead did the town a service by providing his ability to read and declaring new laws, curfews, and the like.

If her own nights had not stirred anything, the simple service he provides does it very much so. He is not the arm or mind of the law, but simply its voice. That was forgivable. He was there to earn his keep, to reach out for his dreams. Something about that occurs to April, causes a brief flicker of wonder if some of these other men had tried the same and fallen into disrepute as time went on and their limits were tested in the sometimes unforgiving Pawnee winters. They only had so much will, and this man was so much younger than the rest. He couldn't have been older than twenty, a number so insignificant that April laughs at it.

"Hello," was all she could muster for him when she found him buying the same soap as her. 

The embarrassment that filled her for weeks is unheard of, something that she hasn't felt in years beyond years. How, on this Earth, is she anxious of speaking to a man? A living, dirty and handsome man that could read more than the men that called him a joke. They say he lived in a pit before, literally just outside of Pawnee, until that same woman in the council offered him work upon discovering his literacy. She wants to ask him what that life was like, living technically underground, and what his apparent farm-life could have been like, but the words fail her.

He smiles, greets her similarly. "Hi," he says with a smile.

She burns in response.

She tries not to, but stalking his visits to a stable where a young boy works intrigue her. She learns this is his cousin, and his relatives here go by the name of Wyatt. The former worry -- dread that this was something else -- melts away in an instant. Replacing it is a guilt for what she did that night, stealing into his dream. 

But, oh, she dreamed as well. Several nights where his body, young and mortal, took hers in more ways than her words could describe. All it was, in those hours, was a lust she hadn't known for a century.

Could he quench it though? That was a real question, but she must find the hour, the time, for it to be right. As of now, with the hour of her feed descending upon her once more April is lost in conundrum: should she stay, find him once more in the night? And, if so, could she restrain herself to simply taking, trading? 

Or could she, if she found the words, say the first ones in years to a man that weren't in scorn?


	2. Faith

For a full season, April's thoughts drift carelessly to a single night out of all these she has experienced in so long. It's not so strange, really, as she lets herself wander in the treasure of memories she's hoarded and guarded jealously, as if there would be one to steal them -- ask, take, either way it was theft -- but this one is not the same; or, if she were to care at all,  _he_ is not the same.

She opens one such book, hopeful to escape but the pages feel blank. They're of course filled to the margins with jottings of a madwoman desperate to preserve that way a lock of hair rested behind an ear of April's closest companion for so long, and how she looked in that moonlight pooled in monochrome about her alabaster skin; or the baying of a begging man at his wit's end, hoping for respite; or, even, the almost tantric days of solitude, if she could be said to experience anything close to God,  before this blasted cesspit _Pawnee_ appeared. But each and every one of those tastes is dull.

Then there is a jingling of baubles hanging a full ten yards from her home. There are no lights to destroy in here as she has no reason for them in the dead of night. She hides in the back of the hovel, patiently listening for the sounds of men and the scent of steel and fear. Instead, warm blood and curiosity. Likely a deer or escaped livestock drawn by the unnatural pull of the place, the welcoming whisper in their ear when they came too close. Too tired to deal with either, April looks back at the books, the piles lining an entire side and the few she's stolen away thrown elsewhere. The scents back away and that damn distraction put it all into focus how  _important_ this one feeding feels. 

"Andrew," she whispers to the books. The name seeps into the page bidden only by the word. She smiles, unsure for the first time in a long while what will follow.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The apartment building is pockmarked with crosses, and though April is flattered they think it would take a God to stop her intrusions there isn't much in the way of harm they do to her. Instead, she twists them every once and a while, inverts them just to hear the cries in the night when her prank is discovered. She believes it harmless, and traipsing between shadows gives her occasional audience when she's drunk on stolen dreams but, for some reason, the Pawneeans abhor the joke. Her skin never burns at the daylight, and the odd bulb of garlic.

There was even, once, a complex series of knots tied from door to door.

But sneaking into the apartments is simple, and the perceived obstacles do nothing to stop her progress inside when she wants to be there. She half-suspects something foul to be at play, but instead Andrew simply wakes, goes to his work, returns to eat and sleeps. She is not ashamed to admit she watches him steal the occasional bath, soap mysteriously appearing at his bedside. But nothing. No vice, save a horrendous belching, and nothing remotely sinister about him. In fact, the air around him is different. Not mystical, nothing at all. It's almost as if he is a blank slate still waiting to be written on, nothing at all about him is special. Nothing about him  _should_ be special. In a world where she exists, where an unfortunate decision yields so many years of wandering agony,  _this_ is what catches her fancy?

She realizes she's starting to go insane by the second bath, and thoroughly lost whatever shrivel of a mind left when she nearly gathers her shape together in his room. His snoring is so soft, with spikes that are oddly funny. But just as she reaches out, she sees the pitch black of her nails. 

"Andrew," she whispers under breath, sending a chill to him. He stirs and sits up briefly, the cool word startling him awake before he lies back in bed and tightens his covers. 

She  _could_ take from him easily, and the hunger rolls over her, but for some peculiar reason the shadows leading out of this room and into the next, across the hall, are far more enticing. A sudden change of heart, mind the irony, wills her to invite herself upon the worrisome mind of a dreamer across the hall. With one parting, lingering glance, April leaves him to sleep with his dreams unbroken.

 

 

* * *

 

 

It all goes wrong two nights later.

She watches him undress again, the voyeurism not hidden to April but certainly not avoided. At first, it was to investigate her first suspicion -- eunuch. No man around here could resist the temptations of a local midwife who moonlighted in the equally if not differently respectable occupation, and yet he ignored her advances. Even April had let herself succumb to those, though the suggestion was certainly hinted first by April and her useless pile of stolen money. Naturally, the only answer could have been a lack of care for any of that, or lack otherwise. Needless to say, his equipment is not lacking.

So now it's habit, and she hides her breaths well. But as clouds part and moonlight spools about his bed, she cannot overcome this new, insatiable urge. "Andrew," she whispers into the dark, hoping the cool would curl away into a whelp of dust and be forgotten in the sparse light.

Instead, he shivers, but does not stir. Before she can stop herself, April lets out a heavier breath, and watches him shift in bed comfortably. "Andrew," she repeats.

This time, she collects herself into something worth looking at. It's the same visage he spotted in the markets those days ago, a pretty and sullen face that could be remarked upon but none would bother with for much other than a laugh or a queer look. The black immaterial shaped around her falls back into the dark corner, resuming its thick blotting, and April sheds its remnants into the moonlight, willing away the remainder. He sits up completely this time, and April does not bother to surrender herself to him, to attack him either, but to simply stand and wait. Her arms should be riddled with chilling bumps, but she watches his eyes drink deep of her image.

April pays no mind to the black still around her claws, inking her hands, wrists and up with strings broken by the dark olive of her skin underneath near her elbows. She lifts one, a beckoning finger for him. For, "Andrew," she whispers.

He hears and stands.

She half-expects him to run screaming, but his eyes stay transfixed on her naked form. Rightly so, as hers has on his for so long. It is only fair. Instead, he walks forward and the height difference -- him a full head taller than her -- brings to this moonlit meeting a new, heightened tension. 

He opens his mouth to speak but not much comes from him. "Who..." he asks but trails away. His eyes widen and he says, "That girl...? It's you, from the shops--"

"Kiss me," she commands.

Though, not with  _that_ tone. He is not forced, so to speak, but she can already see he doesn't hate what he sees. And,  for the witching woman in the hovel out of town, that is oddly comforting. Especially from one who has captured her thoughts entirely, stolen her books from her so that a full volume has been written about his body, his eyes. Another for the kindness in his words.

Another would be written about this night, when his lips are warmth against hers for only a moment. Darkness creeps from her hands and stabs into her skin, burrowing away so that the flesh underneath could touch his heat. Warm blood and curiosity. When he retreats to look at her again, April misses that sensation of his lips. She wants to order him to continue where he left off, but she doesn't have the chance. 

"Your name?" He asks, somewhat sensibly for a man nude and distracting her so with his hands and reactions. "Please, if this is a dream I must know your name."

She has half a mind to whisper his own back, a cruel joke, and let him awake with his hand around himself in this mouth watering state, but instead she sighs. Trailing one hand up his moon-shrouded body, she ignores temptation and finally lands with a finger -- not a claw -- against his lips. "April," she says slowly, letting the name flow from her and seep into him.

His eyes glaze over for a moment as he basks in the glow of her name before his lips come crashing down against hers once more, this time, with his hands at her waist unbearably cold for his living flesh, urgent and needy. He asks no questions, and that is his greatest vice so far. The only crime he has committed is buying into her bribery of carnal sin, though she notes with one look before setting him on his back on the bed and planting herself firmly on top of him, is that there is not a single cross in this room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ~1.5 months is pretty good right.......................................................
> 
>  
> 
> ?


End file.
